Jury deliberations start in trial of Illinois deputy who killed Sonya Massey

PEORIA, Ill. (AP) — An Illinois jury has begun deliberations in the first-degree murder trial of a sheriff’s deputy who shot Sonya Massey, a Black woman in her home who had called 911 for help and was later killed because of the way she was handling a pan of hot water.

The eight-woman, four-man jury received the case just after 11:30 a.m. Tuesday. Jurors must decide whether Sean Grayson, 31, is guilty of murder for fatally shooting Massey in her Springfield home.

Grayson and another deputy answered Massey’s emergency call reporting a prowler outside the 36-year-old woman’s home early on the morning of July 6, 2024. They entered the house and, spotting a pan of hot water on the stove, Grayson ordered it removed, according to the other deputy’s body camera video, which was key evidence.

Grayson and Massey joked about how Grayson moved away as Massey moved the hot pan. Then, Massey said, “ I rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” Grayson yelled at her to drop the pot and threatened to shoot her. Massey apologized and ducked behind a counter.

“She makes it abundantly clear, ‘I want no part of this. Let this be done,’” Mary Beth Rodgers, Sangamon County First Assistant State’s attorney, said in her closing argument. “She doesn’t say, ‘Let’s go, Sean.’ She says, ‘I’m sorry.’ He has no right to go into her kitchen, where she’s hiding from an angry man with a gun, he has no right to follow her and shoot her.”

Defense attorney Daniel Fultz beseeched the jury to decide how Grayson felt in the moment, “not to sit back 15 months later and say, ‘This is what I would have done.’”

“He drew his weapon to gain compliance, to make her realize that whatever she was considering doing, she shouldn’t do,” Fultz said. “It is true that she put the pot down. If it ended there, we wouldn’t be here today, but for reasons we’ll never know, she reacquired the pot, stood up and threw it in his direction. Only at that time did he fire his weapon.”

Massey’s killing raised new questions about U.S. law enforcement shootings of Black people in their homes. The accompanying publicity, protests and legal action over the incident prompted Judge Ryan Cadagin to move the trial from Springfield, 200 miles (320 kilometers) southwest of Chicago, to Peoria, an hour’s drive north of the capital city, because of pre-trial publicity.

If convicted of first-degree murder, Grayson faces a sentence of 45 years to life in prison. The jury also has been given the option of considering second-degree murder, which applies when there is a “serious provocation” of the defendant or when defendants believe their actions are justified even though that belief is unreasonable.

Second-degree murder is punishable by a term of four to 20 years or probation.

In an unusual step for a defendant in a murder case, Grayson testified in his own defense, saying he considered using a Taser to subdue Massey but was afraid it wouldn’t work given the distance and the counter separating them. He said he determined that Massey was a threat and drew his 9 mm pistol only after she uttered her “rebuke” twice — although prosecutors pointed out that was because he didn’t hear her and asked her to repeat it.

Dawson Farley, the other deputy on the scene that morning, testified that while he followed Grayson in drawing his gun, he did not see or hear anything that caused him to consider Massey a threat. But Farley, who did not fire his weapon, acknowledged that he initially told investigators he was threatened by the hot water. Fultz suggested in his closing that the reason the then-probationary employee changed his story after Grayson was indicted was so he wouldn’t be criminally charged too.